A Pioneering Yeshiva In 1930s Brooklyn
I read with great personal interest Dr. Yitzchok Levine’s May and June “Glimpses Into American Jewish History” columns on Flatbush yeshivas in the 1930s.
I am 86 years old and the younger daughter of Rabbi Moshe Mordechai Magnes, who was the founding director and principal of a boys’ yeshiva in Brighton Beach in the late 1930s. The yeshiva began in the backroom of the Young Israel of Brighton. As it grew, a building was purchased on the corner of Ocean Parkway and Neptune Avenue. It was called the Yeshiva of Brighton.
A resident of Brighton, a Mr. Lewin, had invited my father to help build a yeshiva there. Mr. Lewin knew my father from the late 1920s, when my father served as Hebrew principal for the Jewish Orphans Home on Tuckahoe Road in Yonkers. My father was a true educator. He hired young men who had graduated from local yeshivas and trained and mentored them in the art of teaching. He gave them a curriculum and instructed them in its implementation.
The building had been part of an estate on Ocean Parkway. The ballroom of the estate became the shul, lunchroom, and auditorium for the school. I recall that Moshe Oysher once gave a concert there and that rabbis of note – such as Rabbi Yitzchok Elchanan Wasserman from Europe and Rabbi Baruch Shapiro from Seattle – came to speak there.
With the coming of World War II, the shul was used to register people for the distribution of ration cards. My sister and I assisted in the registration process. She was 15 and I was 13 at the time.
I should like to add that my mother was also an educator. She was the first teacher/principal of a frum girl’s day school in Williamsburg. It was called Bais Rochel. It later morphed into the Bais Yaakov.
I trust this information will be of some interest to readers.
Esther Serebryanski
Brooklyn, NY
Ignoring Islam’s Terrorism Problem
It’s laughable that President Obama, while discussing a group called “Islamic State” that fights in the name of Islam and is a greater threat to moderate Muslims than all Western countries combined, claims that if we use the words “Islamic terrorism” it will play into their hands and turn this into a war between Islam and the West.
Newsflash: That war has already been declared against the West, and every Muslim in the world knows that ISIS and al Qaeda are killing in the name of Islam. I would imagine that Muslims find it more insulting to think that Americans believe they are willing to join a bloodthirsty gang of zealots who bastardize and defame their religion just because we use the word “Islamic.”
If Islam has nothing to do with terrorism, then why has the target of every single one of President Obama’s drone strikes been a Muslim?
Call it whatever you want, but the fact is there are Muslims who want to murder us in the name of their religion. The president’s willful blindness is not helping anyone. Convincing moderate Muslims that these acts of terrorism have nothing to do with their religion absolves them of all responsibility to stop them. It also provides no incentive to reclaim their faith from those who have hijacked it and made proponents of its most archaic interpretation the most influential.
Also, by stigmatizing the recognition of Islam’s connection with terrorism, it makes Americans hesitant to report suspicious behavior for fear of being called an Islamophobe.
The president has argued that many faiths have a history of preaching hatred, but while most religions have a dark past, only radical Islam is actively pursuing a dark future.